Thriving is subjective but every single 30+ I know is able to financially support themselves in the common sense of the word so I’d say a quite high number. Probably around 80 to 90% if not higher.

It’s good to keep in mind that not showing emotions doesn’t mean not feeling them. Men don’t generally act that way with each other because there’s a real and always-present danger of actual violence. Disagreements usually either get solved, or we just bury those feelings until someone pushes us over the edge - and then we punch them in the face.

That’s not an option when you’re a man working with women. You can’t let things escalate because they can take it further than you can. He might be boiling inside, but there’s no outlet for it. We just deal with it and we’re usually quite good at that since we’ve been doing it all our lives.

My misogynist girlfriend found this funny too.

Perhaps midwit meme format would work here as well with Ubuntu on both ends and everything else in between

I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re buying tools, you should go for the sets. Take a socket set, for example. Realistically, you’re probably using the ratchet, an extension, and three to four sockets the most. At some point the cheap ratchet breaks and you replace it with a high-quality one. You may also lose or break a few of the most commonly used sockets and replace them with high-quality ones. In ten years you’ll have a set with a high-quality wrench and a few high-quality sockets that you commonly use, plus the rest of the other sizes you’ll only touch once every few years.

Had you gone for the high-quality set right away, you would have paid even more - and now you’d have a 4mm made-in-Japan socket you spent 10 euros on that you’ll never use.

It’s normal. Worn out clutch has different and more noticeable symptoms.

There are countless ways I feel different from the people around me, but spending habits is a big one. I never had the urge to start buying things when I got money. I’ve just always saved it. Even as a kid, I had a chest with a lock on it where I kept all my savings. I was always the one people borrowed money from and paid back with interest.

Now as an adult, I find it even easier not to go on a spending spree when I get a large lump sum of money from somewhere, because getting more money doesn’t really enable me to buy something I couldn’t have bought before. Even when I do treat myself to something, it’s usually BIFL quality, so once I have it, I never need to buy it again.

I guess it’s worth noting that always being alone with no one to spend the money with helps too.

No idea, but my 15 year old Sony seems to be hanging on just fine.

Looking at my ChatGPT “random questions” tab and the things I’ve asked from it, much of it are the kind of things you probably couldn’t look up on encyclopedia.

For example:

“Is a slight drop in the engine rpm when shifting from neutral to 1st gear while holding down the clutch pedal a sign of worn out clutch”?

Or:

“What’s the difference between Mirka’s red and yellow sandpaper?”

Well, first of all, like I already said, I don’t think there’s substrate dependence on either general intelligence or consciousness, so I’m not going to try to prove there is - it’s not a belief I hold. I’m simply acknowledging the possibility that there might be something more mysterious about the workings of the human mind that we don’t yet understand, so I’m not going to rule it out when I have no way of disproving it.

Secondly, both claims - that consciousness has very little influence on the mind, and that general intelligence isn’t complicated to understand - are incredibly bold statements I strongly disagree with. Especially with consciousness, though in my experience there’s a good chance we’re using that term to mean different things.

To me, consciousness is the fact of subjective experience - that it feels like something to be. That there’s qualia to experience.

I don’t know what’s left of the human mind once you strip away the ability to experience, but I’d argue we’d be unrecognizable without it. It’s what makes us human. It’s where our motivation for everything comes from - the need for social relationships, the need to eat, stay warm, stay healthy, the need to innovate. At its core, it all stems from the desire to feel - or not feel - something.

I don’t think it does, but it seems conceivable that it potentially could. Maybe there’s more to intelligence than just information processing - or maybe it’s tied to consciousness itself. I can’t imagine the added ability to have subjective experiences would hurt anyone’s intelligence, at least.

He might be passive but the implication is that you’re supposed to live certain way or you’ll end up in hell. This most likely isn’t the case in a simulation.

No. I’m already living frugally. Cutting my spending by further 45% would make my life unsustainable.

I don’t even remember what they did when I bailed. Some redesign thing close to a decade ago. I’ve been using Podcast Republic ever since as it resembles what Pocket Cast was like before they screwed it up.

People floating would go against the laws of physics of this simulation.

God is a loaded term though. Yes there would be a creator but it could be a completely passive observer.

That’s the point - it wouldn’t. People seem to expect that things would be different or meaningless if we did but I’ve never understood that logic. Even if we do live in the base reality it could just as well be a simulation and nothing would need to change.

Same argument applies for consciousness as well, but I’m talking about general intelligence now.

Same argument applies for consciousness as well, but I’m talking about general intelligence now.

The chart is just for illustration to highlight my point. As I already said - pick a different chart if you prefer, it doesn’t change the argument I’m making.

It took us hundreds of thousands of years to go from stone tools to controlling fire. Ten thousand years to go from rope to fish hook. And then just 60 years to go from flight to space flight.

I’ll happily grant you rapid technological progress even over the past thousand years. My point still stands - that’s yesterday on the timeline I’m talking about.

If you lived 50,000 years ago, you’d see no technological advancement over your entire lifetime. Now, you can’t even predict what technology will look like ten years from now. Never before in human history have we taken such leaps as we have in the past thousand years. Put that on a graph and you’d see a steady line barely sloping upward from the first humans until about a thousand years ago - then a massive spike shooting almost vertically, with no signs of slowing down. And we’re standing right on top of that spike.

Throughout all of human history, the period we’re living in right now is highly unusual - which is why I claim that on this timeline, AGI might as well be here tomorrow.